The Annual Members' Juried exhibition highlights local and nationally-recognized artists whose works range from drawing and painting to sculpture and photography. Juried by internationally renowned curator Julien Robson, the exhibition represents the incredible diversity of subject, media and technique available to today's most promising contemporary artists.

The DCCA Members exhibition is not only an opportunity to take a look at the high quality and rich vitality of art being made in the region, it is also an opportunity to explore the tendencies and commonalities that artists here appear to share. As a juror I see my role as one of supporting and promoting art of the highest quality but would be at pains to insist that mine is not a scientific practice but one that is critically directed while being deeply affected by my own subjectivity. After selecting works for this exhibition I was asked whether I had noticed any particular tendencies among the submissions and while my first impulse might have been uncertain, in retrospect, as I have thought about how to place works and display the show, I have begun to see commonalities that suggest not only correspondences between different artists’ works but also this curator’s keen interest in the work of art as a form of resistance.

By resistance I am not referring to a direct political subject matter that might be illustrated in the work but, instead, the way the form and content of a work reveals complex ambiguities that short circuit its containment within an all-encompassing (totalizing) meaning. Refusing to be framed or controlled in a singular manner, I see these works as open-ended, continually slipping the constraints of description and making fragile the boundary that divides one meaning from another. For example: painting oscillates between material and illusion, and abstraction and figuration, resisting their amalgamation; photography stops and expands time, revealing what’s there while resisting its own fidelity to the seen; sculpture stands still yet suggests the passing of time, revealing the tangible while resisting substantiality. Bringing these and other conditions into effect, the works in the exhibition employ strategies of abstraction, translation, curtailment, and defamiliarization that give life to resistance. And, as representation becomes contested ground, the boundaries that seemed so clearly to frame and define their meanings become fragile and porous, opening up and engaging the imagination of the viewer.